Incendiary Image of the Day: Messi Gets Muzzled Edition

It’s hard for an American to understand the adulation accorded professional footballers (a.k.a., soccer players) everywhere on planet Earth save the United States. For an instant education, click here for wikipedia’s explanation of why Mr. Messi is a messiah amongst Maradona’s minions. Next, click here for the raw footage of Lionel Messi’s arrival in Saudi Arabia for a “friendly” (skip to 3:41 for the muzzling). Then know this: if an ND had taken out Messi it would have been extremely messy for the Saudis. In fact, the Falklands War was started for less. Thankfully, the hand of God protected the pride of Barcelona. If you know what I mean . . .

Haha, tru dat. To try to put Messi in perspective: imagine Michael Jordan in basketball. Remember all his achievements and trophies and individual awards. Now imagine he’d achieved all of that at the age of 25 already. He’s already considered the best player in soccer history and he has probably at least 7 years in his prime to go.

We’re the only country except Switzerland that allows common ctizens to own military quality weapons, we’re also one of the very few countries that dosen’t worship soccer. Is Switzerland big on soccer?

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a correlation? Stranger things have happened,

The Swiss are big on soccer. They have a multitiered league system just like the rest of Europe and their teams participate in continental competitions, doing fairly well on occasion. They did respectably well in the 2010 World Cup, but were in a fairly strong group that included Spain and Chile, who were the ones who ended up going through. Switzerland actually beat Spain though, and only lost 1-0 to Chile.

Soccer’s fairly huge in parts of the US, too. Up here in Cascadia, we have a nice rivalry going between Vancouver, BC, Seattle, and Portland. Here in Seattle, the last home match against Portland had a crowd of 66,452. You can bet there are a lot of people up here who know who Messi is and how special he is. If only the Sounders had someone a tenth as good on the team…